Porpoising

I have always associated myself with dolphins.  They’re pretty cool.  They swim.  They surf.  They feast.  The mate.  That’s pretty much a dolphin’s life.  If they drank wine, they would totally be my spirt animal.  We rarely think about their cousin, the porpoise.  The porpoise is, essentially, the homely cousin in the cetacean order.  They are shorter, stalkier, and more erratic than their finned, mammalian family members.   Even though they are though and beautifully marked, porpoises aren’t as fit and attractive as dolphins, so they are often cast off as outcasts, rejects, in-notables.  But still, porpoises are cute and fun and the bob up and down.  They’re just real likable. And relatable. 

I started thinking about the porpoise last week.  I was really tired.  Of a lot of things.  Mostly I was tired of people who are underqualified to do simple tasks.  Just as I was about to unleash my mental garbage on someone, I closed my eyes and I saw a very vivid picture from my past.  It was a memory from one of my earliest days in the Coast Guard.  I don’t remember the exact scenario.  I feel like it was something like throwing a tow line to a vessel in distress, but as I heaved the monkey’s fist, I stepped on the line, it tied a bowline around my ankle and as I was dangling between boat, not only didn’t the slack in the line get caught in the props, but it also pulled two other crewmembers into the water and I was forced to watch them drown while I hung, suspended by my ankle from the tow line in the frigid winter Puget Sound waters. 

What really happened was I tangled a tow line during a training evolution, and while passing the line to another boat, it ended up in a tangled heap in the water and I spent six hours untangling and drying it.  But during the training debrief, I had eight pairs of eyes on me asking what went wrong.  I remember my face getting hot.  So hot I thought the skin was melting off.  Someone asked, “What happened, Angela?”  All I could say was “I guess I dropped the ball.”  Silence.  More silence.  Awkward silence.  Then the guy who was driving the boat looked at me and said “You didn’t just drop the ball, Angela.  You dropped it.  Tripped over it.  Kicked it.  Watched it roll down the gutter, fall into the storm drain.  It sat in the sewer for a few hours until high tide came and swept it out to sea where a baby Dall’s Porpoise…A BABY…Choked on in and died.  He died because of you.”   

After that brief, yet illustrated diatribe ended.  I didn’t say anything.  I just mentally envisioned that ball rolling down the gutter.  Then, in my mind, I saw that baby Dall’s porpoise washed up on the beach with the ball he choked on, hanging out of his mouth.  I couldn’t sleep for months.  It was horrifying.  All because of a tangled heaving line that I fixed by myself.  But it left an impression.  It was a statement made by a man so intelligent that I couldn’t ever imagine being his equal. 

Well, last week, as I was in the midst of a mind boggling situation with someone as equally inept as I was on what we will now refer to as that “line passing day,” I heard those same words escape my lips.  To a grown person.  So, I sat for a few minutes and remembered where they came from, nearly 16 years before.  I was both outraged that I had to use that mantra to another adult and amazed that I could recite it without hesitation.  As I sat, I thought to myself, “You need to tell him the impact that he made on your life.”  But still I was torn.  I was torn between being angry at myself for losing my cool and being angry at myself for repeating the words that had left me alone on so many sleepless nights.  I was torn between reaching out to a man whose words had kept me up so many nights, and the rejection that might result from finally admitting that to him. 

Well, if you know me, you know I can’t keep my mouth shut.  So I did it.  I sent him an email.  A day or two passed, and I hadn’t heard back from him.  Naturally, I figured that he still considered me a porpoise slaughter.  I let it go.  I had said what I needed to say.  At least it was done then.  Then, this morning, after five days off, I logged into my email. As I sifted through a pile of email, mostly of little consequence, I spotted his name at the bottom.   Maybe I was scared to open it.  Maybe I thought it was spam.  I ignored it.  For a few hours anyway.  Then, at lunch, I remembered that email was still sitting in my inbox. 

After I finished my leftover pot roast, I went back to my computer and read the email.  I read it. Then I read it again.  After that, I read it one last time, for good measure.  And after all those readings, I finally understood what he was saying.  He said stuff.  But he was honest.  He said that sometimes he wants to do something different, but he stays because of days like this.  He said that, maybe, he once thought himself to bit a badass.  Without saying it, he said “I’m bobbing up and down, too.”

If I saw that man tomorrow, I would hug him so tight, I might never let go.  Not because he taught me the most influential lesson I have ever learned about responsibility.  Even though he did that, he also taught me about highs and lows.  He taught me that even though your head is under water, you can still breath. 

Porpoises are fucking bad asses.  They get the back seat to dolphins.  We all want to be dolphins.  But nobody ever called surviving “dolphining.”  It’s called porpoising for a reason. 

-Inner Peas